The city is often a dizzying, demoralizing place to be. It can also be a place of sinful pleasures, where the nighttime can dominate over the daytime as a backdrop for many human activities. The divisions we create between work and play and inspiration and desperation make our lives resemble a continual cycle of freedom and imprisonment. Frequently, to escape the oppressiveness of a city, people look for the specific type of material pleasure that suits their personality- like a key that unlocks their prison cell.

This concept is depicted in the piece, and instead of just focusing on one material pleasure, it shows the tantalizing array of ‘keys’ that a city can provide. From left to right: the internet, art and music, aggression, spirituality, drugs, sexual fetishism, and driving (technology). Looking through the key-ring, the viewer sees the various routes emanating from each key laid before them, as the moon looms above, powerful like an enormous eye.

Technique:
Done with ink on paper, this piece was a really nice exploration of composition and form. I could play with overall symmetry and yet vary the smaller details a lot, and all the objects involved were very basic, lucid forms that could be arranged intricately but without cluttering the whole. Also, because of the nature of the setting, many of the lines could be merely ‘suggested’ rather than actually drawn, which further helped simplify things (and thus allow a complex layout). I played with perspective by warping the buildings outward, rather than inward (the way they should realistically be). This created a stronger sense of freedom and eliminated any potential parallel vertical lines which would’ve made the background monotonous.